Green jobs growing, but not as fast

Each year, the Next 10 public policy group issues a report on the state of California’s green economy.

As green job reports go, it’s pretty exacting. The researchers actually count real jobs at real companies, rather than relying on estimates or projections. The drawback is that the jobs figures are always two years out of date. Precision has its price.

The latest report shows green jobs in California growing between the start of 2010 and January, 2011. But the pace of growth slowed from prior years, for once lagging behind the growth of employment throughout California’s economy.

It’s hard to know exactly what to make of that.

Job losses from the closing of Solyndra's Fremont plant, shown here, aren't included in the latest Next 10 green jobs figures.

Since the job counting stopped at the start of 2011, the figures don’t include the 1,100 positions lost when Solyndra closed its doors later that year. The solar manufacturing industry was consolidating in 2010, but that consolidation only appears to have accelerated since then. The market has become so brutally competitive that some of the Chinese companies blamed for driving Solyndra and other U.S. manufacturers out of business are now struggling to survive.

Then again, considering how fast the number of solar installations has risen in California in the last two-plus years, you’d expect to see some healthy job growth among installers. And some other subsets of clean tech have been doing well. The report’s job figures, for example, don’t count the people now working at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, making luxury electric cars. Production there didn’t start until last year.

So take the report as a snapshot — useful, but hardly the last word. To find out how many green jobs Next 10 counted in California, check out my story here.